Under
international law, what we are seeing is effectively the annexation of
one country by another.

How did it come to this? Somehow, the small clique who rallied around
the former Grand Chancellor, Albrecht Boeselager, have managed to turn a
matter of the Order’s own internal governance into a full-blown
diplomatic crisis between the two oldest and most prominent sovereign
entities in the western world.

The clique never had much of a case. As I have written before,
there is no question that, legally speaking, the commission set up on
the recommendation of the Holy See’s Secretariat of State to investigate
his sacking of Boeselager was and remains totally illegitimate.

It is clear that Boeselager was dismissed, following his refusal to
resign, according to the approved legal process of the Order. It has
been alleged that Fra’ Festing “defied” Pope Francis by dismissing
Boeselager.

But any opinion the Pope may have expressed before the event
would have been in the much-rumoured letter on the matter from the Pope
directly to Cardinal Burke, the Holy See’s envoy to the Order.

This
letter has not even been formally confirmed as existing, let alone
leaked. Its purported contents remain the great unanswered question at
the heart of this whole affair.

As far as one can tell from the various reports, the Pope actually
gave no indication that he was opposed to the firing of Boeselager. In
fact, the Holy Father seems to have been deeply concerned about the
gravity of the allegations against Boeselager and even at the
possibility of masonic infiltration of the Order’s membership and
activities.

The fact that the actual text of this letter has remained
totally confidential speaks volumes about the discretion and respect for
the Holy Father of both the Cardinal Patron and the Grand Master, even
as they have been publicly accused of the opposite.

Fra’ Festing’s humility and courtesy are typical of the man. He has
served the Order and the Pope well, with total devotion and respect for
the obligations of the law and his position. And now, he has been forced
from his position for doing his duty. Yet Boeselager – who refused to
obey a direct order from his sovereign – and his allies have triumphed.

These allies have carried out a sordid campaign of leaked letters
from Cardinal Parolin’s department, which served the sad and obvious end
of framing a public narrative in which Fra’ Festing supposedly “defied”
the explicit wishes of the Pope. In fact, even according to the
confused and changeable timeline constructed by his friends, it was
clear that Boeselager was dismissed well before Cardinal Parolin’s
apparent (and still illegitimate) intervention.

The sad and severe consequences of this chain of events are
considerable. The international legitimacy of the Order of Malta is now
in ruins, its constitutional integrity and diplomatic standing now seem
beyond repair.

Today’s announcement of an Apostolic Delegate to be appointed by the
Pope represents, essentially, the total abrogation of the Order’s
sovereignty. Yet the consequences for the Holy See itself may, in the
longer term, be equally or even more severe.

The disregard for the
mutually sovereign relationship between the Holy See and the Order sets a
precedent in international law, which will now lurk under the
Secretariat of State’s dealings with other governments like an
unexploded bomb.

If the Holy See can so brazenly insert itself into the internal
governance of another sovereign entity whose legitimacy stems from a
mutual agreement under international law, it now has no legal defence
should another sovereign body, say the government of the Italian
Republic, choose to view the independence of the Holy See as a similarly
anachronistic formality.

Cardinal Parolin should prepare to see today’s
actions cited as legitimate precedent when the IOR, commonly called the
Vatican Bank, finds its sovereign independence under renewed pressure
from other countries or international bodies. Pope Benedict XVI said
that “a society without laws is a society without rights”; the naked
disregard for the law shown in recent weeks has sown a bitter harvest
for the Holy See’s diplomatic corps to reap in the future.

For those less concerned with the diplomatic and legal aspects of
this situation, there is one over-riding truth which has emerged from
all this. It is now clear that for all the great hopes of curial reform
which accompanied the election of Pope Francis, the Vatican remains a
place where cliques and personal networks have more authority than the
law, and where leaking and smearing remain part of the everyday business
of governance.

The Pope himself is, as he has often stated, not a lawyer, nor is the
law something he is known to have much interest in. Those in his curia
who have prompted him to this action have deliberately served him, the
office of the papacy, the international sovereignty of the Holy See, and
of course the men and women of the Order of Malta, incredibly badly.

I
suspect it is now just a matter of when, not if, they come to regret it.